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Mysteries 2014

Tom Nolan picks the year’s top 10.

Dec. 12, 2014 5:33 p.m. ET

Among novels of historical intrigue, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “One Night in Winter” is in a league of its own: a chronicle of privileged figures afraid for their lives in Stalin’s Russia. Politics could also prove fatal in 19th-century France, as in Robert Harris’s novel of the Dreyfus Affair, “An Officer and a Spy,” while corruption in contemporary Glasgow forms the background of Denise Mina’s “The Red Road,” an entry in her Alex Morrow series. Laura Lippman’s quietly stunning “After I’m Gone” moves back and forth in time, uncovering long-kept secrets; similarly, finding the truth behind the killing of a young woman...